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Navigation for Are Standards in the Software Industry a Chimera? - Dare Obasanjo's weblog

I've been reading quite a bit about various opinions on standards in the software industry. The first piece I read about this was the C|Net article You call that a standard? where Robert Glushko said

Q: Why have so many standards emerged for electronic commerce?A: One of the issues here is what a standard is. That is one of the most abused words in the language and people like you (in the media) do not help by calling things standard that are not standards. Very few things are really standard. Standards come out of standards organizations, and there are very few of those in the world.

There is ANSI (American National Standards Institute), there is ISO (International Organization for Standardization), the United Nations. Things like OASIS and the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Organization) are not standards organizations. They create specifications that occasionally have some amount of consensus. But it is the marketing term to call things standard these days.

I tend to agree that a lot of things the media and software industry pundits call “standards” are really specifications not standards. However I'd even claim that simply calling something a standard because some particular organization produced it doesn't really jibe with reality. There has been lengthy discussion about this C|Net article on XML-DEV and in one of the posts I wrote

The word "standard' when it comes to software and computer technology is usually meaningless. Is something standard if it produced by a standards body but has no conformance tests (e.g. SQL)? What if it has conformance testing requirements but is owned by a single entity (e.g. Java)? What if it is just widely supported with no formal body behind it (e.g. RSS)?

Whenever I hear someone say standard it's as meaningless to me as when I hear the acronym 'SOA', it means whatever the speaker wants it to mean.

Every one of the technologies mentioned in my post(s) on XML-DEV (SQL, Java, RSS, Flash) can be considered standards by developers and their customers for some definition of the word 'standard'. In particular, I want to sieze on Glushko's claim that standards are things produced by standards bodies with the example of ANSI (American National Standards Institute) and the “SQL standard”. Coincidentally I recently read an article entitled Is SQL a Real Standard Anymore? written by Michael Gorman who has been the Secretary of the ANSI (American National Standards Institute) NCITS (National Committee on Information Technology Standards) H2 Technical Committee on Database for over 23 years. In the article he begins

What Makes a Standard a Standard?

Simple. Not implementation, but conformance. And, conformance is “known” only after conformance testing. Then and only then can users know with any degree of certainty that a vendor’s product conforms to a standard. ...But, from the late 1980s through 1996 there was conformance testing. This was accomplished by the United States Government Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). NIST conducted the tests in support of public law that was originally known as the"Brooks Act," and later under other laws that were passed in the 1990s. The force behind the testing was that no Federal agency was able to buy a DBMS unless it passed conformance tests. Conformance meant the possibility of sales. ...The benefits derived from the NIST conformance tests were well documented. A NIST commissioned study showed that there were about $35 million in savings from a program that only cost about $600 thousand. But, in 1996, NIST started to dismantle its data management standards program. The publically stated reason was"costs." Obviously, that wasn’t true. ...In May of 1996, I wrote an article for the Outlook section of the Washington Post. It was unpublished as it was considered too technical. The key parts of the article were:

"Because of NIST’s FY-97 and beyond plans, SQL’s conformance tests and certifications, that is, those beyond the SQL shell will be left to the ANSI/SQL vendors. They however have no motivation whatsoever to perform full and complete testing nor self policing. Only the largest buyer has that motivation, and in the case of ANSI/SQL the largest buyer is the United States Government. ..."Simply put, without robust test development and conformance testing by NIST, DBMS will return to the days of vendor specific, conflicting features and facilities that will lock Federal agencies into one vendor, or make DBMS frightfully expensive acquire, use, and dislodge.”

This definitely hits the nail on the head. Standards are a means to an end and in this case the goal of standards is to prevent vendor lock-in. That's it, plain and simple. The rest of Michael Gorman's article goes on to elaborate how the things he predicted in his 1996 article have come pass and why SQL isn't much of a standard anymore since vendors basically pay lip service to it and have no motivation to take it with seriousness. Going back to Glushko's article on C|Net, SQL is a standard since it is produced by a standards body yet here we have the secretary of the committee saying that it isn't. Who are we to believe?

From my point of view, almost everything that is called a 'standard' by the technology press and pundits is really just a specification. The fact that W3C/ISO/ANSI/OASIS/WS-I/IETF/etc produced a specification doesn't make it a 'standard' by any real definition of the word except for one that exists in the minds of technology pundits.

Every once in a while someone at Microsoft asks me “Is RSS a standard?“ and I always ask “What Does That Mean?“ because as shown by the articles linked above it is an ambiguous question. People ask the question for various reasons; they want to know about the quality of the specification, the openness of the process for modifying or extending the specification, where to seek clarifications, or whether the technology is controlled by a single vendor. All of these are valid questions but few [if any] of them are answered by the question “Is <technology foo> a standard“.